Chip McDonald

It's like it's going forward into the future inside an old barn.

That is not necessary is it...?

As an added bonus of living inside the Matrix in the 21st century, I get to see my name referenced everywhere (or did before covid19). "NO CHIP READER" "CHIP MACHINE OUT" "CHIP BROKE" "ONLY CHIP PAYMENT" "CHIP NOT WORKING" and my favorite, "INSERT CHIP HERE" (...uhm... there is a geometrical-spatial incompatibility I'm afraid...) .... and now my right wing "friends" tell me BILL GATES IS PUTTING ME IN EVERYBODY'S VEINS!!!! OMG OMG OMG!

I went from knowing a handful of people with it, a few deaths from friends of friends, to suddenly last week a lot, maybe 1-2 a day on Facebook. Which would be in keeping with Christmas and New Year's. And the natural unchecked curve, which should go exponential any day now with the hospitals full. The people I know that have had it feel they're out of danger. They think they've got immunity equivalent to the vaccine, and because they feel fine "no harm done". Which isn't necessarily the case, and they're making things worse as examples. Meanwhile I know a guy in his 30's who got it back in May whose sense of taste hasn't come back, says he has to make himself eat "cardboard". Another (also in his 30s) that says he "gets winded a bit" walking around, who "got over it" a month ago. No big deal. The heart, kidney and liver problems will show up a few years from now and be another reason we need to make M4A happen - hospital owners are salivating at the future profits...

FDA says they're not approving the Astra-Zeneca Oxford vaccine until APRIL. Which is rubbish, given they're already giving it in the U.K. and elsewhere, it should only have been weeks behind the same approval process given to Pfizer and Moderna. Astra-Zeneca obviously didn't grease the right hands in the U.S. government. The massive publicity Pfizer and Moderna got before the roll out, and the distortion "reporting" of the Oxford vaccine (when there was any...) is quite telling. The Oxford vaccine doesn't have the same logistical distribution problems Pfizer/Moderna has, it's a travesty it's not being doled out here in the States! My 86 year old father is on the Georgia Department of Health list - nothing, VA - nothing, and the local clinics that apparently were authorized to give it to elderly ran out fast. Meanwhile we're a big medical school town here in Augusta Georgia - and they're slowwwwwwly vaccinating employees here, but slowwwwwwly, and some don't want it. We have the resources here to have had EVERYBODY in the health care industry vaccinated in 2 days, it's ... ..it's a lack of leadership from the top. You know who I'm talking about. From January on, things could have been different, and the lack of preparation for this - when they had *months* - the lack of the use of FEMA, pushing the responsibility onto the States - is another indictment. 3 million doses a month IS NOT GOING TO WORK. It will MUTATE. We should all have access to the vaccine by the end of next month, logistically it could and should have happened. This is a frakking NATIONAL EMERGENCY.

I won't have the vaccine, it's not true bypass.

You don't look that old in your profile pic, are you a frontline worker? How did you get it? The local VA has been giving shots to staff and convalescent vets, but I can't get my father in. This is a cluster, zero planning from the government. At this rate it will be 10 years before everyone is vaccinated, the virus will mutate beyond the vaccines long before then. Frakking frak.

POSSIBLE JOKES: "Gonna be hard fitting that in a syringe" "... the Edge was quoted as saying "this innovation will save U2 thousands in touring costs" "My pedal board is smaller, but I can't let the audience see where the guitar cable goes"

I've become concerned about staring/looking down at my left hand playing guitar 6+hours a day for 35 years. I occasionally have the randomly occurring neck pain, and try to open plugin windows on the monitor to the right of my main monitor, to try to give my cervical vertebra .. a break... uhg, from looking the other way constantly.

That seems to adventurous for NAMM, but I could see Chuck Surack doing it at Sweetwater. Have YouTube channel for each exhibitor and a live chat running all day. Which is what a lot of people would have been doing at NAMM this go around anyhow, except it would have been driven by the gear review channels instead of the show itself. Will do - good panang chicken at a teeny tiny Thai restaurant there, I have no idea the name of it, just how to get there!

Online shark tank?

A song that I wrote off the cuff as an excuse to test an artificial singing VST (emvoice), that seems to resonate with me more than anything else I've done. Maybe because of how personal it is? But also how I managed to make the lyrics work within the phrasing limitations of the plugin, and being able to make the music/melody match exactly what I wanted, without dilution. I had a German shepherd for over a decade, that always sat at my feet when doing music at home, and she was not doing well - and was on my mind at the time. She had hip dysplasia, and probably cancer; spent more and more time daily sleeping, except when trying to stand at the door looking outside - which was extremely sad to watch. I knew she would pass soon. She's laying at my feet but getting up slowly. As she tries hard every day She's unsteady and unsure But she sees green trees, and all she's missing Not today Pay for it later today doesn't matter Sleeps cures it all again Not today More sleep, running around More sleep, running around Dreaming, running, never catching Running, catching, sleeping Dreaming, running, never catching Running, catching, sleeping Trying, still breathing Paris Not Today

Faux, but appropo: Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows

I doubled my $100 BTC, I feel Gordon Gecko gangsta like Mnuchin. Meanwhile GC, bankrupt, built a new store in my town. The magic of unbridled capitalism.

Strange, the day I made my post the link on their homepage took me to a NAMM member log in - I couldn't find any other reference to "Believe in Music" or anything "2021 NAMM show" oriented. "Market place"? I hope they're not going to try to subvert Reverb/EBay/etc.? Lot of people/organizations/businesses are taking "this time" as an opportunity to make some overtly bold and daring moves. I'm not sure if now is the time to be trying that. I've used Door Dash in Falls Church - lots of great ethnic food choices there, Eden Center across from the Guitar Center and the H-Mart counter...

It seems that way? *IT IS*.

There are outliers now, thanks to YouTube. I don't think Rogan, Jimmy Dore, Lex Fridman have the same "acting!" motivation as the above. Or rather, there isn't a performance aspect. But that differentiation seems lost on most people. It's one of the main reasons I developed and almost physical abhorrence for network television in the 90s: the Fake Talking Head Presentation. Nobody seems to have a problem with being welded with attention to such people as a source of information instead of entertainment, when those people went into "broadcasting" as a business decision, and in most cases did spend time acting at some point. Or worked with the CIA, hah. "Chip, in the year 2021 every network tv news show will feature presenters that are from the CIA". Wow. I don't know. I would say it's more sinister than that. They are given a narrative to deliver, whether it's Hannity or Maddow. Or the View, or any of the other clandestine messaging "entertainment shows". ..and that's deliberate; remove nuance and make everything polar, keeps the demographics clean.

It occurs to me I was always the guy complained about because I wore earplugs. Everyone has always been "anti-mask" around me, and I didn't internalize it as an affectation of basic i.q.. Quite a lot of analogous behaviors there, and now that I'm thinking about it.... a person I know that is "very anti-mask" is also someone I was in a band with that liked to insist "you can't be rock and roll with ear plugs!". A curious thing to announce - as if you're of a station whereby your pronouncement of such a thing shouldn't be offensive, or questioned. "I'm more rock and roll not because of my talent, but because of my willingness to destroy my hearing", "I'm more of a patriot not because of my active role in making America better, but because I'm not afraid of COVID". Masks = ear plugs?

I've seen studies in the mw range. But none take into account resonance, and can't really, for small scale structure geometry. But the thing that is telling to me is - put your phone very near and object, a mm or 2 away, and then call it from another phone and run music through it for an hour. Then feel the temperature of the object. That it won't boil water doesn't matter to me. Temperature change and EM fields impact cell interactions, whether it's significant or not I have no proof of, but given it's your brain I err on the side of caution (use the speakerphone). Not since she changed her name from Bill Hicks.

53 hours of this footage! Peter Jackson owes it to the world to get at least 52 of it out there. The preview is astonishing - NEW footage of what has been for all of my life a band that is frozen in time by media! It's amazing how enlivening to the music it is, when given new visual imagery of them interacting in that context - it makes the music fresh again, having new visual memory to associate with it. That alone is an interesting phenomenon....

Nice, post-world music without the "wearing it on my sleeve" self consciousness... And a positive message, a tricky thing these days.

I keep hearing that the "virtual NAMM" show was open to everyone, but there is no application/info except for members on their page. It will be interesting to see how they manage. They *should* have some sort of online front end with "halls", a clickable "floor map" to enter online chat demos, where a manufacturer just has the demo guy on camera all day like at the show...but I suppose it won't be like that.

Ahh, yes. That's a more technically adroit style than people know I think - some of those guy's arpeggio technique is very advanced. Are you familiar with Vietnamese street music? I reference that because I think the sound/timbre of the delay had character. The Vietnamese sound being dependent on a cheap Chinese karaoke reverb chip, Nice! Like a "more aggressive David Byrne side project". The "Guitar Paradise of East Africa" record is interesting... sounds like it's all recorded on narrow format tape - cassette 4 track, half inch 8? Very soft high end, but all of it has a forward/dry percussive/dry drum machine element and a echoey or "distant" element... it's a production style that sounds like "late 80's U.S. television commercial production" but used to better artistic advantage. That guitar on the Kabaselleh track is bright... Almost has a gurgly SPX-something chorus, it sounds like it's gone through an SPX90? The Sukuma Bin Ongaro track has the same SPX tonality, but with a Bill Frisell warble... I like the Kilonzo/Kiliambogo Brothers guitar sound, the upfront non-euphonic recording sound but with a more "traditional Fender amp sound"... The contrast in euphonic-woofy bass and ultra dry ostinato bits in that high-life style music is something that would be entertaining to hear enter into Western pop music, it's like some hip hop music is trying to do it but it isn't self aware enough to make it a blend, nobody is brave enough to stray too far from the 808 providing the euphonic low end...

A worrisome trend IMO is the "post Alex Jones Dismissal" effect. It's now trendy-hip to be flippant about anything that is non-mainstream, to make a joke about it. Even now, despite the Snowden revelations - people have returned to thinking "they're listening to you through your phone" is a "wacky conspiracy theory". Even now, when Google, Facebook, every other tech presence is going it - and we *KNOW* it - the herd mentality is "don't worry about it" at the most. It's a weird sensation of cognitive dissonance, when I hear so many of the right wingers echo a sentiment of distrust I've always had, but ramped up in a weird non-sensical way. It's almost like a social manipulation project to polarize "believers" from the "sheeple", in ironic agreement with the anti-science anti-mask people I despise. People have been brusquely forced into a habit of polar, non-nuanced thinking. It's almost as disturbing to me to hear a "left leaning" friend dismiss Alex Jones as it is to hear a right winger say "the vaccines are a mind control experiment!" or some such. Both are non-cognitive response to information that may contain partial truths, buried in what I'm increasingly thinking is a carefully crafted noise of misinformation.

There are ample studies showing cell phone radiation impacts cell tissue, as well as having macro effects on the brain operating as a whole. The only way they're approved as "safe" is by doing studies with the antennas x cm away. Radiation doesn't have to be ionizing to have an effect on atoms/molecules. When most people crush their phone against their ear when they're using them. It's easy to find scientific evidence - very quick look: "Nerve cell damage in mammalian brain after exposure to microwaves from GSM mobile phones " https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/12782486/ "Exposure to GSM 900 MHz electromagnetic fields affects cerebral cytochrome c oxidase activity" https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/18585429/ "Continuous Exposure to 1.7 GHz LTE Electromagnetic Fields Increases Intracellular Reactive Oxygen Species to Decrease Human Cell Proliferation and Induce Senescence" https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32514068/ .... and there are plenty more. And there are studies that show 5G is pretty bad, and the use of different narrow band EM fields is a big growth sector of DOD projects for crowd control. It's easy to dismiss everything as being "Alex Jones!" but it doesn't mean there isn't truth in there somewhere. So now I reach a homeostasis of returning to being a "conspiracy nut" here, while mysteriously I'm a sheeple to the 1,000 right winger "friends" on my Fb who think 5G caused SARS COV2 and won't take the vaccine because Bill Gates put a nano chip in it.